may be regarded as the Homeric representative
farmer, as well as bailiff and swineherd,--the great original of Gurth,
who might have prepared a supper for Cedric the Saxon very much as
Eumaeus extemporized one upon his Greek farm for Ulysses. Pope
shall tell of this bit of cookery in rhyme that has a ring of the
Rappahannock:--

"His vest succinct then girding round his waist,
Forth rushed the swain with hospitable haste,
Straight to the lodgements of his herd he run,
Where the fat porkers slept beneath the sun;
Of two his cutlass launched the spouting blood;
These quartered, singed, and fixed on forks of wood,
All hasty on the hissing coals he threw;
And, smoking, back the tasteful viands drew,
Broachers, and all."

This is roast pig: nothing more elegant or digestible. For the credit of
Greek farmers, I am sorry that Eumaeus has nothing better to offer his
landlord,--the most abominable dish, Charles Lamb and his pleasant
fable to the contrary notwithstanding, that was ever set before a
Christian.

To return to Hesiod, we suspect that he was only a small farmer--if
he had ever farmed at all--in the foggy latitude of Boeotia, and knew
nothing of the sunny wealth in the south of the peninsula, or of such
princely estates as Eumaeus managed in the Ionian seas. Flaxman has
certainly not given him the look of a large proprietor in his outlines:
his toilet is severely scant, and the old gentleman appears to have lost
two of his fingers in a chaff-cutter. As for Perses, who is represented
as listening to the sage,[A] his dress is in the extreme of classic
scantiness,--being, in fact, a mere night-shirt, and a tight fit at
that.

[Footnote A: Flaxman's _Illustrations of "Works and Days,"_ Plate I.]

But we dismiss Hesiod, the first of the heathen farm-writers, with a
loving thought of his pretty Pandora, whom the goddesses so bedecked,
whom Jove looks on (in Flaxman's picture) with such sharp approval, and
whose attributes the poet has compacted into one resonant line, daintily
rendered by Cooke,--

"Thus the sex began
A lovely mischief to the soul of man."

I next beg to pull from his place on the shelf, and to present to the
reader, my friend General Xenophon, a most graceful writer, a capital
huntsman, an able strategist, an experienced farmer, and, if we may
believe Laertius, "handsome beyond expression."

It is refreshing to find such qualities united in one man at any time,
and dou